REPORT: GMA LOST VIEWERS WITH COURIC

The career path of Katie Couric is beginning to resemble that of another former Today show co-host, Jane Pauley, after Pauley left the NBC morning show. Brought on as a substitute co-host for Robin Roberts, Couric returned to early-morning TV on ABC’s Good Morning America last week and was expected to lift it to first place for the week for the first time since 1995. Just the opposite happened. The audience gap between the two morning shows widened to about 400,000 while Couric was hosting the show. That makes it two flops in a row for Couric, who presided over a ratings-challenged CBS Evening News for five years before joining ABC. (This fall, she is scheduled to launch an afternoon talk show — as Pauley did, with disastrous results, in 2004.) Meanwhile, Tom Cibrowski, the senior executive producer of GMA, has told the New York Times that its goal is to “become the No. 1 morning television program, and we will not stop until we do.” He denied that he was disappointed in Couric’s performance on the show, saying that Couric may fill in again in the future, perhaps when co-host George Stephanopoulos takes a vacation.

COMPLETE CANNES COVERAGE HERE

STUDIO BRIEFING will present complete coverage of the 2015 Cannes Film Festival every day beginning May 13.

Now Receive Studio Briefing via Email

You can receive Studio Briefing daily via email as one scrollable doc, without ads, and hours before it's available elsewhere online. It's the quickest way to get your daily briefing of the issues and events that affect the TV and motion-picture industries -- a digest of the entertainment news that matters. And it's ideal for reading on a mobile device. It's just pennies a day -- $4.95 monthly or $49.95 annually. And you can unsubscribe any time at the touch of a button.